You'd think this sort of stuff belonged to the past - but no. Apparently, Microsoft is afraid of Android on its Windows 8 tablets, because Intel has just announced that it will provide no support for Linux on its clover Trail processors. Supposedly, this chip is "designed for Windows 8". What?

Your reaction makes it very clear you have no clue what you are talking about regarding open systems.

Wrong.

If it wouldn't be for open systems, you would not have internet the way it is today, and it probably would not even exist. You would have a lot of company-specific networks instead, like a Google network, and a Microsoft network, and so on. If it wouldn't be for open systems, email would not exist, ftp would not exist, ssh would not exist, http would not exist.

A lot of technologies in IT would not exist the way they do today. Even OSX wouldn't exist the way it is today, since they wouldn't be able to build it on top of BSD.

That does not mean that there is no proprietary technology that made big advancements or anything like that. But saying that open systems is irrelevant, just shows you are clueless.

After all that rambling, some reasonable, some ridiculous, you end it by claiming I said open systems are irrelevant? Just one problem, ...I said no such thing. I suggested the overall contributions to advancement resulting from the two be compared, not that one is relevant while the other isn't. Apparently you don't know the difference which explains, I guess, why you're making ridiculous claims.

Btw, the big difference between open systems and closed systems is that open systems allow others to build on top of them and takes things even further. Closed systems only allow the creator of the closed system to build further on it.